Trump's TRUMP Coin Flops as Whales Make Off With $214M, Leaving Most Buyers Underwater

Donald Trump's brand may be built on a perception of "winning," but buyers of his spectacularly shady TRUMP coin are experiencing the exact opposite.

Donald Trump may not be following the spectacular rise and fall of his memecoin closely, but its buyers certainly are — and experiencing the exact opposite of “winning.”

Soon after Trump launched TRUMP days before his second inauguration, its value nosedived from its all-time high of $78 as hyped-up crypto bros rushed to cash out. It currently sits at a pathetic $17 per token — a shell of a grift that once saw nearly $72 billion worth of market cap at its peak.

Now, fresh analysis by Bloomberg suggests TRUMP’s dramatic fall is the result of 21 whales pulling out gobs of cash, leaving the vast majority of the coin’s faithful buyers at a loss.

Of all the profit generated by TRUMP, some $214 million went to these whales within the first two days, while at least 20 percent of buyers broke even or lost money. The whales had one thing in common: they all made substantial, well-timed transactions of the coin, in some cases within just minutes of its announcement.

One particular trader amassed about $1.1 million in USDC — a “stablecoin” mapped to the value of the US dollar — just hours before Trump announced his coin to his throngs of followers on Truth Social. Within minutes of that post, the trader made a buy representing roughly 6 percent of the available supply of TRUMP, and then spent the next few days offloading it to various wallets, racking up millions in profit according to Bloomberg.

The trading platforms administering Trump's coins also struck it rich, with current estimates putting the total transaction fees they've earned at around $100 million. At least one of the platforms involved in the frenzy, CIC Digital, is owned by Trump himself, though it's currently unknown how big a piece of the pie it received.

The vast majority of buyers also lost out in an even clearer way. Look at this price chart for the token, courtesy of CoinGecko — virtually everybody who bought the coin after its earliest days has now seen the value of their holdings decrease, which is the opposite of what you want an investment to do.

When asked by reporters for comment on the apparent pump-and-dump scheme, Trump played dumb: "I don't know much about it other than I launched it... I heard it was very successful."

The whole debacle is raising even more red flags about the volatility of memecoins, particularly as TRUMP copycats spill onto crypto platforms like fruit flies.

Some scams are riding the coattails of Trump's obvious-yet-ambiguous recent crypto endorsements, like one pretending to be founded by his youngest son Barron Trump.

Others are aping Trump's supposed legitimacy as the "Crypto President." In the wake of TRUMP's debut, for instance, hundreds of smaller crypto ventures sent samples of their memecoins to Donald Trump's digital wallet, evidently seeking to fake a presidential endorsement to dupe gullible traders.

This trick is possible thanks to a unique "feature" of crypto, where records of transactions are permanently imprinted into the blockchain for public viewing. That publicity is often touted as one of crypto's strengths, but is increasingly used to manufacture the type of misinformation and hype and which enables crypto fraud.

"[Trump has] opened the floodgates to deception... and at a minimum to rampant speculation," Eswar Prasad, an economist at the Brookings Institute told the Financial Times.

While rampant grifts are nothing new to the memecoin space, their growing legitimacy at the hands of our elected leaders is. At a time when state lawmakers push to put public funds on the blockchain, one thing's for sure: the scams are just getting started.